June 24 – July 12, 2026
Westbeth Gallery
57 Bethune Street, Inner Courtyard,
New York, NY 1001

Opening reception, Saturday, June 27, 2-6 PM

Gallery hours: Wed.- Sunday, 1-6PM, and by appointment

Special events: July 5, 6 and 7, 2026

Performances of Women of Chelm, by Suzanne Bernstein and Miryam Coppersmith will take place on Sunday, July 5 at 3PM;
Monday, July 6* at 7PM and Tuesday, July 7 at 7 PM, at Westbeth Gallery, with special late evening viewings of the exhibition Jenny@100.

*July 6 is Jenny’s 100th Birthday, and we’ll host a celebration beginning at 3PM…all invited! Refreshments will be served.
Info: Phone/text 347 979-4009 / rbunkin@mail.com

Images: left, Sacrificial Lambs and Rabbits, c. 1948; Center, Smile #2, 1964; right, Four Moods, 2023

This retrospective offers an overview of Jenny Tango’s 80+-year career as an artist.

Tango (neé Florence Schoenbaum), born in Brooklyn, was raised in Washington Heights to Eastern European Jewish immigrants. She attended Music and Art High School and was accepted into the Cooper Union at age 16, completing her BA at Brooklyn College. She married GI poet/novelist Samuel Exler in 1948.
The young couple lived in the East Village; later, moving to a NYC Housing Project in the Lower East Side, and had their first daughter. They collaborated on a popular children’s book, “Growing and Changing”, published in 1957, had a second daughter in 1956, and moved to Flushing, Queens.

In the early 1960s, Tango returned to Brooklyn College, earning her Master’s degree in painting; offered the choice of a clerical or teaching fellowship, she chose the teaching fellowship, the first female student to do so. Despite her artistic and intellectual abilities, the faculty didn’t accept women
as colleagues. As a result, she penned a Fuck You thesis and gained notoriety with a series of proto- feminist paintings, the Smile Series, distorted self-portraits painted from a cracked mirror, exhibited at Brooklyn College and later shown at the Aegis Gallery on 10 th Street. Exler taught art at the newly built public Springfield Gardens High School, which served students from that community: Rosedale, Rochdale Village, Laurelton, and Jamaica. The family moved to Laurelton, and she became a popular teacher, particularly beloved for her experimental spirit. She began to take a strong interest in avant-garde filmmaking, particularly animation, and bought a Bolex Super-8 movie camera with a tripod that allowed one to make single-frame animations, which she encouraged her students to use. Exler taught painting, art appreciation, and filmmaking, and introduced video. She was also an adjunct professor of drawing and art history at Queensboro Community College and wrote interviews of renowned film directors, such as Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin, for the Metropolitan Area Film Instructors Association (MAFIA) newsletter.

Her restless creative spirit led her to experiment with a variety of media, but she always returned to painting and drawing, particularly self-portraiture. She was a remarkably skillful figurative painter and draftswoman. In the 1970’s, she became active in the Women’s Movement, wrote for and edited Women In The Arts Newsletter and the Women’s Caucus of the College Art Association newsletter.

In 1970, she began to mentor Robert Bunkin, an aspiring art student from Rochdale Village, who took her filmmaking class; like her, he was in love with art and film (animation in particular). They had a strong emotional and artistic bond, and eventually became romantically attached. She left her husband in 1973, and they have remained together since, marrying in 1984, after obtaining a divorce.

In 1976, Florence Exler was reborn as Jenny Tango, a name derived from a character in Brecht/Weill‘s Three Penny Opera, a work that both Tango and Bunkin adored. The character of Jenny Diver was the source of her first name, and the Tango Ballad, sung by Jenny and Mack the Knife was the sourceof her surname.

From 1986 to 1988, the couple had an inspiring and productive sojourn in Florence, Italy, where Bunkin completed his undergraduate degree. They shared a studio in the complex of San Lorenzo, a church designed by Brunelleschi, and lived alongside the Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel and Laurentian Library, among other Renaissance treasures.

Tango explored many visual media: animation, artist’s books, printmaking, sculpture, and comics. She created Cannibal Cut-Ups, a comic strip that was included in a feminist collective of artist-commix creators (Bloody Wymmin) that she founded, and Women of Chelm, original stories based on mythical shtetl inhabitants, The Wise Men of Chelm. She visited Chelm in Poland, as part of her research for this book, and used text based on interviews with friends who assumed characters she invented. Handwritten with border imagery and hand-crafted illustrations, this project also inspired a picture history book, The Jewish Community of Staten Island, part of Images of America (Arcadia Publishing).

In the early 2000’s, Tango embarked on a collaboration with Staten Island-based sculptor Susan Grabel: Project Venus, a feminist investigation of aging female bodies.

In 2014, at 88, Tango (and Bunkin) joined the Westbeth Community. She continued to paint and draw long after retirement from teaching and political activism. Despite declining eyesight, she still attends Westbeth’s Figure Drawing Group.

Tango never pursued commercial fame or notoriety, but her independence, skill, and inventiveness resulted in a remarkably fresh, original, and relevant body of work. She maintained a commitment to representation and figuration despite the lack of artistic validation for that genre during much of her
lifetime.

The exhibition will include a selection of portraits of Jenny Tango painted by Robert Bunkin, and collaborative works with Susan Grabel.